Retired Steven Soderbergh now spending his days getting high on The Sot-Weed Factor

Steven Soderbergh may have retired from feature filmmaking, but that doesn’t mean he’s just going to buy a house out in Kauai and spend his days drinking so much rum that every time he burps it tastes like coconut—even though this sounds amazing. Let’s all go do that right now. But before we do, let's consider the news that Soderbergh, in addition to dreaming up his promised Magic Mike and Cleopatra musicals, is also spending his “retirement” working on a 12-hour miniseries based on John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. The 1960 novel has apparently been on the director’s mind for a while, and now Soderbergh believes he’s finally figured out a way to adapt the 800-page, satirical, tangent-filled historical epic—about a poet’s travails in the tobacco farms of colonial Maryland—that may or may not be feasible and super cool. “I think I’ve come up with a solve to do it cheaply,” Soderbergh says rather cryptically. “It’s bold. If it works, it’ll be super cool. And if it doesn’t, you won’t be able to watch ten minutes of it.” This suggests that Soderbergh’s strategy is to come to your house and blow enough "sot-weed" in your face that you’ll watch 12 hours of just about anything, though it’s possible he has something else in mind.